"I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave".----Breece D'J Pancake, in a letter to his mother.

Andrea Null

A Geology Lesson for Troubled Girls

Yes, the wall is flowstone, wet with the breath of a man.Going palm by palm, you might mistake it for the teethof a beast or drowned ribbons underhand. I knowyou’ve heard the curse before: a fool’s balanceclaims the girl who listens to the dark. But trustthere is a cloak of ink and that lantern splashes light.Call her a midwife, a confessor, just a woman with a rule,She comes day after day, and she traces your fingertipon a seam so black it’s blue, a seam so black it’s blue.Engage with shadow. Play with Plato. Hold upa mirror in a cave. How could this wall be waterand go back again?

Local Flow

Bible says He went to the well, drank a whore’s warm water.Later, with Thomas’s fingers in his side, he poured more warm water.

Your wife stitched for three months a Double Wedding Ring.In three minutes I led you beneath the patches and took your warm water.

I tore the stillhouse down, cracked the copper kettle, let flowthe yeast-sugar, but hid for you in the floor warm water.

Blot from the annals the fallow time when fields cracked, faulted,my lantern’s spill. Forget the miles you ran for warm water.

Stitches

This night I could take a step alone down a road in West Virginia and lead a thousand silent Adams out of Eden. I know the way.

I fished lingerie from out behind a laundromat drierwith a wire hanger at seventeen, belted the thing, called it vintage, and shook it in front of God and everybody. I traced stolen make-up around my eyes in the tiny mirrors of drugstore aisles, I gnawedon hipbones and made the same promises to millionaires and penniless men.I bruised them.

But when I look down at my hands, I see stitches in the skin: I was made,made from mistakes, and the fleshis as much a mirror as a quilt is;it stains with tears and it goes dun with sweat,each wrinkle folds without rest. Thank Godyou choose to close your eyes and wrap yourselfin warmth. I’ll write you a thousand pagesbefore I die; each lie more honest than the last.

When I was a little girl, my family went camping at Yokum's Vacationland near Seneca Rocks in Pendleton County, West Virginia. There, you could sleep in a giant cement teepee and buy helgrammites for fishing bait. I remember an old general store, and my parents let my sister and I pick out any two souvenirs each. We chose matching canteens and "Indian" feathers to clip into our hair. We longed for a rite of passage just like the legend of Princess Snowbird, beautiful and strong enough to climb to the summit with water for our parents and ourselves. At the lookout, we all ate Vienna sausages from the can and drank from our canteens, which had bounced on our hips the whole hike.

Andrea Null is a schoolteacher in Charleston, West Virginia. Her writing has appeared in the Oxford American, Shenandoah, Fanzine, and the West Virginia Encyclopedia. She is a graduate of Washington and Lee University.